Ghosts - 05 (7 page)

The snow was falling thick and heavy, fat flakes that settled on everything, softening edges, turning the parked cars into sculptures with gracefully curved lines. The snow was deep; a trough had been shovelled down the centre of the sidewalks that was wide enough for two people to pass, the walls of snow and ice on either side reaching up to Milton’s knees. He walked at a decent pace, following streets that he remembered from the last time he had been here.

He stopped at a currency exchange and swapped two of the hundred dollar bills in his pocket for roubles. He turned to the street as the cashier counted out his money and saw the man from the hotel a hundred feet behind him, talking into the open window of a Mercedes SUV that was parked against the bank of snow on the road side edge of the sidewalk. Reinforcements, Milton thought. Fair enough. It didn’t concern him. He took the notes from the cashier, put them into his pocket and set off again for the station at Ploshchad Revolyutsii. He stepped into the relative warmth inside the heavy glass doors and bought a fur trimmed
ushanka
from the stall-holder who was doing a brisk trade flogging hats, scarves and gloves to credulous tourists. He put the hat in his pocket, bought a day ticket for the trains and made his way to the platform.

A second tail got ahead of him, probably alerted by a call from the third agent, the one in the car. He was waiting on the platform. Milton recognised him as an intelligence man without very much difficulty. He was standing alone at the end of the platform where the civilian statues were; the athletes, the engineers, the proud revolutionaries with their puffed out chests and bulging biceps. It was the obvious spot for him to wait; he would have a good view of new arrivals. He was glancing at a newspaper that he obviously wasn’t reading, speaking the odd word from the side of his mouth into a throat mic hidden beneath the scarf around his neck. The Russians used to have plenty of good men. Times had changed; now that the prestige and influence of the security service had been affected by the fall of the Wall, they had plenty of bad ones too, and more of the latter than the former. They were bad ones tonight. Milton thought, a little ruefully, it might have been nice to have been assigned some professionals to keep an eye on him. More of a challenge to lose them and, he admitted to himself, he'd been out of the game for a year. It would have been good for his ego to know that he still demanded their full attention.

Never mind.

Milton walked towards the man and looked into his eyes for a moment before he clocked him and turned away. Milton wasn’t concerned that the man knew that his cover had been blown. He wanted him to know. His ego again.

Milton looked across the tracks to the other platform and waited until the display board advertised a wait of a minute for the eastbound train. He remembered the station well from the times he had been active in Moscow and its geography came back to him without difficulty. He turned on his heel and walked quickly to the stairs that you took to transfer to the green line. He took the steps two at a time, quite sure that he would have sent the man on the platform into a spin and enjoying that knowledge. He turned his head as he reached the middle of the bridge that crossed the tracks: on his left he could see the collection of disc-shaped chandeliers, running away down the platform and, eventually, into the darkened maw of the tunnel from which the trains emerged; on his right was the corresponding walkway that offered a way to cross the line from the other side of the platform. It was close enough for him to see the agent hurrying up the stairs, walking quickly but daring not to run. He was still being careful, even as he was fearful he was going to lose his target. Perhaps he didn’t know that he had been blown; if that was right, that just made him even more pitiable. The train wheezed into the station, the doors sliding open on runners that could have done with a drop of oil, and Milton embarked. It was just two stops to Pushkinskaya. He looked at the etiolated panelling and the strip lighting that flickered and cut out at regular intervals. Eastbound and westbound trains at Pushkinskaya pulled into different sides of the same platform and a second train was drawing to a halt just as the doors of Milton’s train opened. He walked across the platform, quickly obscured by the emerging throng of passengers, bundled up in their thick parkas and muffled hats.

He boarded the westbound train.

He took the
ushanka
and pulled it onto his head, untying the ear flaps from the crown and straightening them all the way out, enough to obscure his face. He looked down at his feet, yet glanced at the platform through the corner of his eye as the train jerked and bumped into motion. He saw the agent, confused and lost, caught between the eastbound and westbound trains, unsure which one he needed to be on. Had he changed trains or had he stayed where he was? The train slid away, Milton looking down again to hide his face as the agent passed before his window, and then they were back into the tunnel and accelerating in the direction from which he had arrived.

Milton sat in the seat, running his fingers over the rough, threadbare upholstery. He looked up and down the train and, satisfied that he was not being followed, settled back to read the advertisements that offered cures for indigestion and hair loss and sexual dysfunction that were neatly arranged beneath the line of the ceiling. He could have been on a train in London, or anywhere else in the world. His eyes drifted down to the woman sitting opposite him and, for a moment, their eyes held. She was dressed in form-fitting blue jeans, ankle length fur trimmed boots and a winter coat with brass buttons that might have looked good from a distance but, up close, looked like it was made out of cheap fabric and probably came from a Chinese or Korean sweatshop. The girl was definitely checking him out. Had she pegged him as a foreigner? Probably. He wasn’t dressed to blend in, and the hat looked like something a tourist would wear, not a native Muscovite. It didn’t matter. He gave her a careful smile; she smiled back, a little aloof, in that way that Russian girls have, and then he angled his head back to the advertisements and ignored her.

He rode the train for a single stop and alighted at Pushkinskaya. He scanned the platform, saw nothing that gave him cause for concern, and navigated the burrowlike tunnels until he found the escalator to the street. There was revolutionary art on the walls of the escalator shaft, striking images of farmhands and soldiers and housewives with doughty forearms that would put wrestlers to shame. It was lit by a row of impressive chandeliers and folk music was playing over the tannoy. He pushed through the heavy glass Metro doors and emerged into the freezing cold of Pushkin Square.

He was on Strastnoy Bulvar, the old road that ran around the Kremlin with dark reaches of park between the lanes. There were snow-covered lawns, benches and statues of famous writers and revolutionaries. A big office block dominated the multi-laned junction, fifteen-foot high letters that spelled out NOKIA anchored to the roof. Neon glared against the snow and the ice. He turned to the south, crossed the gridlocked road and made his way along Tverskoy Boulevard. Four-by-fours crawled up and down the road, white sheets of ice stubbornly resisting the grit, tyres crunching across compacted snow, snow chains rattling, the headlights casting yellow fingers across the dirty white. It was bitterly cold––a digital thermometer in the windows of a chemist showed fifteen degrees below zero––and Milton quickly wished he had a more substantial coat. The freezing air settled across the exposed skin of his face, painful within moments. He wouldn’t be able to stay out in this weather for long.

He extended his arm to hail a taxi. Three passed by without stopping until a fourth saw him shivering on the sidewalk and glided into the kerb, the dented fender crunching up against the wall of piled snow. The driver was from the Ukraine; there was a flag on the dashboard next to a miniature religious icon. He stank of vodka and there was a bottle wedged into the space between the two front seats. Milton had taken rides with plenty of drunken taxi drivers in Eastern Europe and the fact that he had not been killed––so far––was enough for him to be sanguine about it. On the other hand, he had always felt a little unsure about trusting a man who advertised his religion so prominently. He preferred his driver to put his faith in simple things, like the rules of the road, rather than trusting everything to God. Milton fastened his seat belt quietly, avoiding the implicit criticism of the man’s driving that he would have signalled had he made it obvious. He gave the address and settled into the seat as the car picked up speed, the driver ignoring the treacherous conditions as the speedometer ticked up to fifty. They were swallowed by the tunnel that cut beneath the Novy Arbat, and then emerged to speed past the Gogol statue. The driver was honest enough and, rather than taking the circuitous route that many would have chosen, picked a direct route to the Kropotkinskaya Metro station.

He gave the driver fifty roubles and another twenty on top and stepped out into the cold. The car had been pleasant in comparison to the arctic blast that greeted him again, quickly chasing away the warmth that he had managed to nurture. The dark curve of the river was laid out beyond the road. The area had been taken over by floating restaurants over the past decade and Milton had eaten here on many occasions. Gorky Park was on the other side of the river although it was invisible tonight, hidden behind the shifting, dense curtain of snow. He half fancied that he could see the neon-tinged outline of the Krimsky Bridge. Beyond that, although he couldn’t make it out, would be the ostentatious floodlit statue of Peter the Great that the Russians had thrown up in the middle of the river. And beyond that, on the other side, was the famous Red October chocolate factory. Milton might even have felt a twinge of nostalgic for the old place if it wasn’t for the cold that had already made a mockery of his hopelessly inadequate coat.

The Armenian supermarket was two hundred yards from the entrance to the Metro. It was on the ground floor of a four storey building with apartments arranged on the three floors above it. It was years since he had last visited but it was all just the same: more goods on the shelves than there had been before, perhaps, but everything was just a little down at heel, a little dusty and dowdy, all a little out of date. The aisles were lit by harsh yellow strip lights that hung from the ceiling on metal chains. The shoppers shuffled between the shelves, the brutal cold knocking the stuffing from them, the melted snow leaving puddles on the linoleum floor. Milton made his way down the middle of the shop and opened the door to the storeroom at the rear. There were trays of produce stacked on pallets, the cellophane wrappers cut away with knives, spoiled goods thrown into a pile near the loading bay.

The office was at the other end of the storeroom and he knocked twice, waiting for permission to enter.

“Yes,” the voice said in harshly accented Russian.

Milton pushed the door and stepped into the small room beyond. There was a desk with a computer, two filing cabinets and a slit-like window that opened onto the trash infested alleyway at the rear of the supermarket. The room was lit by a single naked bulb. An old FM radio stood on one of the cabinets, tuned to a news channel, the voice of the announcer obscured by the regular bursts and burbles of interference. There was a chair before the desk and sitting in it was a woman who looked to be in her late sixties. She was short and stout with a heavily wrinkled face and a bowl of grey hair that was shot through with streaks of silver. She was dressed practically: sensible black shoes with a decent tread, thick stockings and a worn woollen skirt and sweater that had been chosen for comfort rather than style. She had kind, wise, sad eyes.

“John?”

“Mamotchka,” he said, smiling. It meant ‘mother’ in Russian. Her given name was Anya Dostovalov but mother was what he had called the old woman for years.

“My God,” she said, pushing herself out of the chair and crossing the room to enfold him in an embrace. She smelled the same as he remembered: the floral perfume was a trigger that always threw him back to the times he had spent in the East. She put her arms on his shoulders and held him back a little so that she could get a better look at his face. He smiled into her eyes and dipped his head so that she could kiss him on both cheeks. “My God,” she repeated, shaking her head. “I did not think I ever see you again.”

“Mamotchka,” he chided, unable to prevent the smile that twitched the sides of his mouth. “You didn’t think I’d forget about you, did you?”

“I hear what happen. What happen in London.”

“You probably heard their version of it.”

“You must tell me. I hear stories, many stories, you are right, but you must tell what really happened. We will have cup of tea, yes?”

“Something warm would be good.”

“And have you eaten, Vanya?”

John was translated as Ivan in Russian, and Vanya was the affectionate diminutive that replaced Ivan. She had used that for him for all the time that they had known each other.

“I haven’t.”

“Then we must go upstairs. To apartment. I cook for you.”

ANYA SPOKE to the two members of staff on the checkout desk, telling them that they would be locking up tonight without her, opened a door and led him up a narrow flight of stairs to the first floor. The doors to a half dozen apartments faced onto a spare and ascetic lobby; snow was melting on the boots that had been left on mats outside. Anya took the key that she wore on a thin chain around her neck and unlocked her door. Milton remembered the apartment beyond: parquet floor, a faded and moth-eaten rug and a small chandelier that looked grand but, upon closer inspection, was dusty and dirty and broken in several places. Mamotchka took off her shoes and Milton did the same, following her further into the apartment.

There was a bedroom with a single bed, plus a pine wardrobe and dressing table set that was scattered with cosmetics and scents. The tiny bathroom was next and then, at the end of the corridor, a sitting room with a small kitchen arranged at one end. The kitchen was equipped with an old-fashioned stove, a tiny fridge and a stovetop kettle. The sitting room had yet more of the parquet floor, softened by another rug. There was a mushroom-shaped water stain that had spread across the ceiling, peeling the plaster away and a bookshelf with communist-era travelogues and histories. The windows looked down onto the snow choked streets below. The central heating, which was still regulated by the city government, was brutally hot.